Four Generations: On Migration and the God Who Never Looked Away

*Below is an excerpt from my recent submission to the Lausanne Freedom and Justice Network Magazine 2026 Spring Edition. The theme for this edition is: Polycentric faith: Voices, contexts, and Practices Shaping Christianity Beyond the West. For brevity, the entire essay is not posted below, but if you are interested in reading the essay in its entirety, feel free to reach out!

A Story Woven Through Generations

I am the great granddaughter of immigrants and migration has been woven into my family’s story, sometimes by choice, and at other times, driven by necessity. Four generations who understood with each move, what it meant to lose, to love, and to rebuild lives and families entirely from scratch. They carried the weight of military occupation, the vulnerability of fleeing, memories of violence that never fully faded, the grief of losing everything, and the dependence on the kindness of strangers. As a daughter of parents who dedicated their lives early on to living and working cross-culturally, I grew up in three different countries. And yet, unlike those I would later advocate for, I have always had a passport country to return to. 

I was living in Thailand at a time when the Rohingya crisis began to unfold in neighboring Myanmar, and I remember just how deeply my heart ached for the men, women, and children who were forced to flee their homes. Their statelessness rendered them unwanted in their birth country and nearly invisible in the international system. There was much I did not understand then. But something inside me had shifted, and the questions displacement raised were not ones I could ignore.

Why does displacement and migration feel so peripheral to Western theology when it is so central to Scripture?

Migration is a key structural part of the biblical story and when we recover this, it changes how we read the Bible, how we live missionally, and how we respond to the foreigners and migrants among us. 

This is not only my family’s story. It is the story of the majority church. Understanding God’s heart for the migrant, sojourner, and foreigner, is central to how we also understand a polycentric faith* that is formed and reflects the reality of so many Christians around the world amidst cycles of displacement. At a time where there are over 117 million forcibly displaced people1, it is essential that our faith perspectives also include the migrant Church, not as a monolith, but as a chorus of distinct voices whose lived experiences of displacement, resilience, and dependence on God have something irreplaceable to teach the whole Church. 

A Migrant Text

The Biblical narrative is saturated with migration. But more than a recurring backdrop, migration is the very terrain in which God reveals himself, forms his people, and unfolds his redemptive plan. 

Most notably in the Old Testament is the story of Abram, later renamed Abraham. Called by God to leave everything familiar and journey into an unknown land, Abram’s story establishes from the outset that faith is formed through movement and disorientation (Genesis 12:1-3). The covenant God establishes with Abraham on the road becomes the blueprint for the covenant relationship we later inherit through the coming of Jesus and the invitation of new life to all (both Jews and Gentiles). 

But the migrant thread does not end with Abraham. This pattern of God forming identity and revealing himself through the experience of displacement is built into the very liturgical life of Israel.

When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, they were instructed to remember and rehearse their own migration story in an act of worship. “You must then say in the presence of the Lord your God, ‘My ancestor Jacob was a wandering Aramean who went to live as a foreigner in Egypt” (Deuteronomy 26:5). And this memory was meant to shape how they treated others: “Do not take advantage of foreigners who live among you in your land. Treat them like native-born Israelites, and love them as you love yourself. Remember that you were once foreigners living in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 19:33-34).

Remembering displacement was not incidental to Israel’s relationship to God, but built into it. Care for the foreigner flowed directly from their own experience of being foreigners. 

It is into this same story that Jesus arrives. Immanuel, God with us, enters the vulnerability of displacement from the very beginning. Forcibly displaced at a young age, Jesus fled persecution and death threats as an asylum seeker in Egypt (Matthew 2). He had no permanent home (Matthew 8:20; Luke 9:58). In many ways, “Jesus was a divine immigrant, leaving the glories of heaven to live among us and save us on earth" (Soerens and Yang, 89).

God does not merely command solidarity with the displaced. He becomes displaced. 

If remembering displacement was built into Israel’s worship, if God is revealed from the margins in Hagar’s story, if the outsider is essential, if Christ himself became a refugee–what has been lost when the migrant story is no longer rehearsed at the centre of our theological life? 

This is not only my family’s story. It is the story of the majority church. Understanding God’s heart for the migrant, sojourner, and foreigner, is central to how we also understand a polycentric faith that is formed and reflects the reality of so many Christians around the world amidst cycles of displacement. At a time where there are over 117 million forcibly displaced people, it is essential that our faith perspectives also include the migrant Church, not as a monolith, but as a chorus of distinct voices whose lived experiences of displacement, resilience, and dependence on God have something irreplaceable to teach the whole Church.

El Roi Still Sees

He saw Hagar in the desert when no one else did. She was a foreigner, enslaved, and exiled, invisible to everyone else around her, but fully seen by God. He sees the 117 million forcibly displaced around the world, the stateless and those the international system fails to protect. 

He has always been there first. And if the Church is to reflect the God who sees, it must learn to look where He’s looking. Not from a center outward, but from the margins inward. With humility. With mutuality. With a willingness to be taught by those who have encountered El Roi not only as a theological concept, but as their firm foundation and safe place. 

This is the invitation of a polycentric faith*. This is the invitation from El Roi, our God who is close to the brokenhearted. And this invitation has always been there, written into the biblical story, waiting for us to read it whole. 

Sources Referenced in this Post:

• Soerens, Matthew, and Jenny Yang. Welcoming the Stranger. Revised and expanded ed. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018. 

• UNHCR. "Figures at a Glance." Accessed January, 2026. https://www.unhcr.org/us/about-unhcr/overview/figures-glance. 

  
  

If this resonated with you, I've written more on Hagar and Ruth as migrant figures in Scripture... two women whose stories sit at the margins of the biblical narrative and yet are central to God's redemptive plan. You can read more here.

*For more understanding on what the term, a "polycentric faith" is, a polycentric faith acknowledges that Christianity now has multiple centers instead of a single dominant theological or cultural hub. Faith is expressed and lived through diverse voices, cultures, and contexts, each providing unique insights into what it means to follow Christ today. (taken from the invitation for submissions to the Lausanne Freedom and Justice Network Magazine).